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Shashi Deshpande's Moving On: Numerous Shades of Human Relationships

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Shashi Deshpande’s Moving On (Penguin, 2004) is about a father who delights in the human body, its mysteries, its passion, and the knowledge that it contains and conceals. And a mother who wields the power of her love mercilessly. And Manjari Ahuja, the daughter, who after her husband’s death, is made to feel the truth behind the various relationships. Shashi Deshpande’s novel is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate, and thereby she, using the metaphor of ‘body’, gives realistic presentation to the various relationships. Once again she is not content with the objective but is subjective by delineating the interior landscapes of her men and women characters, and unlike others who, to use R K Gupta’s …show more content…

Despite family opposition he married an orphan Harijan girl brought up by his own political guru, the man who had initiated him into Gandhism. There was a complete severance between him and his family. Baba says, “My father too excised his past. He not only gave up his family, he even cast off his family name”(6). But she died soon after, and the second time the girl was a Brahmin. To them Baba and Gayatri were born. An entry in the diary runs thus:

A wife, two children, a good job—I suppose my father was settling down to enjoy these things when disaster struck again. My mother died. …it was acute perforative appendicitis.(8-9)

From then onwards he rarely laughed or even smiled. But he was a very caring father for both—Baba and Gayatri. Not much is told to us as Baba writes in his diary:

I was young, I did not pay much attention to the story of his past. I was young, intent on my studies, concentrating on getting admission to a medical college. (6)

But it is just the past of his father which emphasizes the relation of Baba with his elder sister Gayatri.
In the novel Baba’s relation with his elder sister Gayatri holds significance as both were motherless. It was Gayatri’s caring nature and attachment with Baba that he could never really feel the pang of being motherless. The two grew up together, but with the passage of time some other events took shape. They lived in Bombay where they were joined by their father’s Boss’s sons—two brothers

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